Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, said Wednesday night the measures to prevent the Cambridge Analytica fiasco were “already taken years ago” but that he is “responsible for what happens on our platform”.
Cambridge Analytica, the British data analytics firm, is in the middle of a thunderstorm in the US and Britain after two newspapers reported Sunday that the company harvested personal data about Facebook users beginning in 2014.
Best known for assisting the 2016 presidential campaign of US President Donald Trump, the company is now facing a government search of its London office, questions from US state authorities, and a demand by Facebook that it submit to a forensic audit as well as a sudden drop in its stock value on the Wall Street.
“I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation — including the steps we’ve already taken and our next steps to address this important issue,” Zuckerberg said in a statement he posted on his personal Facebook account.
The social media giant’s tech-nerd head had been silent on the issue till now.
He went on to say: “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you. I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. […] But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”
While some media reports said Zuckerberg wanted to wait until Facebook’s own audit was complete before issuing any comment, he nevertheless did so, saying there were three key methods he would like to employ.
First, users whose data was received and illegally saved by Cambridge Analytica would be notified and apps requiring permission for Facebook data would be probed and those with any “suspicious activity” audited.
Second, the developers’ access to data would be reduced.
Lastly, a button will be added to the News Feed to route users to an already-existing ‘privacy settings’ option that shows app permissions and gives an option to revoke access.
